Meet Bishop Eaton

The Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton was elected as the ELCA’s fourth presiding bishop at the 2013 ELCA Churchwide Assembly. Born in Cleveland on April 2, 1955, Eaton earned a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School...

Luther and Lutheranism

Martin Luther was eight years old when Christopher Columbus set sail from Europe and landed in the Western Hemisphere. Luther was a young monk and priest when Michaelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel in Rome...

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Assignment Process

Assignment completes candidacy for all people, including those ordained in another Lutheran church or Christian tradition, moving them toward first call and admittance to the appropriate roster in the ELCA...

The Two Governments and the Two Kingdoms in Luther' Thought

[1] The facet of his thought commonly referred to as the doctrine
of the two kingdoms has provoked some of the most intractable
confusion and bitter controversy in post-war continental Luther
scholarship, and the ripples of this debate which reached these
shores have all too often amounted to a litany of sweeping
statements which have done nothing to enhance the Reformer's
reputation in England. Yet even before Hitler's war Luther had
endured a century of disfavour among the leading academic and
ecclesiastical circles on this side of the Channel. So marked was
British - more particularly, English - distaste for Luther in the
opening years of this century that the American church historian
Preserved Smith devoted an article to the subject in 1917, listing
Anglo-Catholicism, rationalism, socialism and - since 1914 -
visceral hostility to all things German as four factors which had
conspired to tarnish the Reformer's image in the minds of the
English of that time. 1Fifteen years later the
celebrated Modernist H. D. A. Major was to lament that, 'Today
Martin Luther, the greatest protagonist of the Reformation, is
viewed as a vulgar, violent and mistaken man as hostile to humanist
culture as he was to social democracy.' 2The European conflict of the
next decade provided the cue for the most damaging slur of all on
the Reformer's memory, so that when in 1945 a third-rate
pamphleteer denigrated Luther as 'Hitler's spiritual
ancestor'3 his
thesis had already been expressed by Archbishop William Temple, who
had died the previous year. The smouldering dislike of the Reformer
having been thus fanned into a blaze of contempt, it is to be
feared that despite the post-war Luther studies of Professors Rupp,
Atkinson and Watson - Major's words are as true today as when he
wrote them half a century ago. And there is no dimension of
Luther's thought which has aroused such antipathy as his doctrine
of the two kingdoms: It need only be recalled that a recent writer
of humanist persuasion has, in the context of the outworking of
this doctrine in the Peasants' War, seen fit to compare the
Reformer with none other than Robespierre! 4Before such charges can be
countered, the structure and content of the two kingdoms doctrine
must be outlined.

[2] The perplexity which bedevils scholarly discussion of the
doctrine of the two kingdoms is reflected in the fact that the most
eminent Luther scholars are unable to agree among themselves about
its very name. There is good reason for this discord among the
learned, for under the rubric 'two kingdoms' there lurks not one
doctrine but two. On the one hand, Luther was concerned with the
antithesis, expressed most sharply by the New Testament and St.
Augustine, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the devil.
His first forays into theology as an Erfurt friar had caused him to
become acquainted with the ceaseless combat between those who
follow Cain in adhering to the civitas terrena and living
in bondage to the finite goods of this transient life and those who
follow Abel in cleaving to the imperishable Good which will be
enjoyed in the everlasting Sabbath prepared for the members of the
civitas Dei. On the other hand, however, Luther was also
concerned with correctly apprehending God's present sovereignty
over Christendom, the Corpus Christianum. In this case the
model of the journey of the pilgrim people of God through a hostile
world which is at root a civitas diaboli was no longer
adequate. Hence, in addition to thinking in terms of the implacable
enmity which obtains between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of
the devil, Luther could also explain how God exercises his
sovereignty over all men through two 'governments' represented by
spiritual and secular authority respectively. His so-called
doctrine of the two kingdoms is in fact a pragmatic combination of
these two conceptual pairs, the first of contrasts and the second
of correlates. These two schemes are reflected in the preferred
terminology of the opposing factions of Luther scholars. Should the
accent be placed on the dualism of the kingdoms of God and the
devil, then favour will be shown to the formulation 'doctrine of
the two kingdoms' (Zwei Reiche-Lehre) Alternatively,
should chief emphasis be given to the Interrelation of God's two
complementary modes of rule, then one will speak, as do the
majority of Luther scholars, of the 'doctrine of the two
governments' (Zwei-Regimente-Lehre). Since the two
kingdoms doctrine which emerges from a coalition of these two
strains in the Reformer's thought encompasses the entirety of
divine activity in both preserving the fallen Creation and leading
it to salvation in Christ, it could be used as a kind of conceptual
clotheshorse on which to spread out the whole of his theology. But
even though this scheme would be ideally suited to provide the
author of yet another comprehensive account of Luther's thought
with a systematic structure in which to arrange his successive
chapters, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that the Reformer's
motive in recasting this traditional concept - or concepts - was
not speculative but pastoral. This is made plain by the writing of
1523 which forms the most propitious source for our understanding
of Luther's two kingdoms doctrine, the significantly titled On
Secular Authority - To What Extent We Owe It Obedience. In
this brief treatise the Reformer sought to return an answer to two
fundamental questions. First, what is the purpose and task of
secular authority and what - in view of Christ's teaching in the
Sermon on the Mount - should be the attitude of a Christian called
to exercise it? Secondly, what are the proper limits of secular
authority and what is the fitting relationship between it and
spiritual authority?

[3] Luther avers at the outset of On Secular Authority
that the exercise of governmental power is not founded on the
consent of the governed (as has been almost universally supposed
since the Enlightenment), but on the ordinance of God. He
accordingly appeals to Rom. 13: 1 and 1 Pet. 2: 13.5 The reason for the
establishment of secular authority lies in the divine will to
preserve the fallen Creation and to prevent sinful man from tearing
God's world apart. At this juncture Luther invokes the two kingdoms
dualism: 'We are obliged here to divide Adam's children and all men
into two classes, the first belonging to the kingdom of God
(reych Gottis) and the second to the kingdom of the
world(reych der welt).' 6The first of these categories
is made up of 'all proper believers in Christ' who, in theory at
least, have no need of secular government, for 'true Christians'
are taught by the Holy Spirit to persevere in welldoing and to be
prepared meekly to endure whatever injury and injustice may be
inflicted onthem.7 It is quite otherwise with
those who belong to the rych der welt, and it is for the
purpose of restraining these unruly spirits that God has
established, quite apart from his own kingdom, another 'government'
(regiment), based not on the free direction of the Spirit
but on the coercion of the sword. 8Indeed God has established two
governments which correspond to and cater for the subjects of the
two kingdoms: 'God has therefore ordained two regiment(s):
the spiritual which by the Holy Spirit produces Christians and
pious folk under Christ, and the secular which restrains
un-Christian and evil folk, so that they are obliged to keep
outward peace, albeit by no merit of their own.'9 It is essential to grasp that
Luther regards secular government within this framework as an
integral part of the good divine work of preservation, for -
especially when it conscientiously respects its appointed limits -
civil authority acts as a curb against the kingdom of the devil.
Accordingly, although its coercive authority must partially take
the form of punishment and notwithstanding the fact that, as a tool
of God's wrath, it must work his opus alienum, the eye of
faith may discern in secular authority a manifestation - albeit
usually blurred and at times outright paradoxical - of divine love.
Perception of the divine benevolence which undergirds the exercise
of order-creating authority in all spheres of life ought not,
however, to lead to an unbalanced, 'enthusiastic' and ultimately
idolatrous estimate of the function and competence of secular rule.
The business of government at all levels is to patch up and
preserve a non-ideal reality, and were its task to be compared with
that of the modern hospital, then it might more properly be likened
to the casualty department than to that of plastic surgery. That is
to say, as a preservative of the fallen Creation secular authority
operates under the law, being only indirectly related to the gospel
which, as the life-giving message of the forgiveness of sin for
Christ's sake, plants the new Creation in the midst of the old. As
it is customarily employed the term 'social gospel' is therefore a
theological nonsense. Luther has a parable in On Secular
Authority which speaks directly to the enthusiasm of the
'social gospel'. To rule the world with the gospel would, he
contends, be like a shepherd putting wolves, lions, eagles and
sheep all together in the same fold. In blissful naivete the
shepherd bids these creatures of disparate temperament enjoy their
fodder in peace unhindered by the coercion of dogs or clubs. The
sheep, surmises the Reformer, will indeed follow the ways of peace,
but not for long.l10

[4] In teaching that government is to take place under the law,
or rather according to the 'first use of the law', Luther is far
from advocating a biblicistic theocracy with the law of Moses on
the statute book. As he contended against the legalist Karlstadt,
,the Mosaic law is simply the 'Jewish common law' (der
Juden Sachsenspiegel)11, its enduring validity being
contingent on its consonance with the dictates of natural law. The
Mosaic law in general and the Decalogue in particular are 'simply
the clearest summary of a natural moral law revealed in the
consciences of all men. Even Christ's 'golden rule' is nothing more
than an expression of such law: 'For nature teaches how love acts,
namely, that I ought to do as I would have done to
myself.'12 In
company with the natural knowledge of God, the natural knowledge of
binding moral precepts is obscured and suppressed by the wilful
egotism of Adamic man. Even so, enough remains of the primal
deposit for God to turn to good account in his work of
preservation. In this context Luther delights in heaping praise on
the sages and rulers of pagan antiquity. Such an encomium is to be
found in the Fürstensiegel which the Reformer wrote
in 1534/35 in the guise of an exposition of Ps. 101. The dominant
concept of the exposition is Regiment, a term which makes
no fewer than ninety-five appearances in this short writing. In the
course of his explanation of Ps. 101: 5 Luther contends that, since
its business is with bodily and temporal goods and not with the
eternal salvation of souls, God has subjected the 'weltlich
regiment' to reason: 'The pagans are therefore able to speak
and teach well on this subject, and have in fact done so. To tell
the truth, they are far more skillful than Christians in these
matters.'13 The
Reformer therefore counsels those who would acquire wisdom
concerning the administration of secular government to heed the
literary treasures of pagan antiquity. The preservation of 'the
poets and histories, such as Homer, Virgil, Demosthenes, Cicero,
Livy and afterwards the fine jurists of old' is to be ascribed to a
kindly Providence which wished the pagans to have 'their prophets,
apostles, theologians and preachers for the weltliche
regiment.'14
Secular government can function quite independently of the
Christian faith, so that Luther could point from the pulpit that
the emperor need not be a saint or even Christian: 'Satis est
ad Caesarem, ut habeat rationem.'15

[5] It would be quite mistaken to infer from Luther's admission
that secular authority can be exercised independently of the ethos
of Christendom that he deemed this an ideal state of affairs. On
the contrary, firmly convinced that the business of government 'as
a special way of serving God pertains to Christians above others on
earth',16 the
Reformer did not neglect to augment the literary genre of the
Fürstenspiegel or 'manual of the Christ prince' which
had been a constant feature of the Church homiletic tradition since
the days of St. Augustine. The third page of On Secular
Authority and the expositions of Ps. 82 and 101 fall into this
category. The duly called minister of the Word has in Luther's
opinion, not only the right but also the solemn duty to remind the
bearer of the sword of his duty before God: 'If the preacher in his
official capacity says to kings and princes, "Consider and fear God
and keep his commandments," he is meddling in the affairs of
secular authority (weltlich Oberkeyt). On the contrary, he
is thereby rendering service and obedience to supreme authority
(hohesten Oberkeyt).'17 For his own part Luther
counsels the Christian prince in On Secular Authority to
trust God and to be diligent in prayer; to use his office for the
service to his subjects; to sift his ministers' advice with due
discrimination and to deal firmly with evildoers, yet erring on the
side of lenience rather than severity. 18These pages are imbued with
Luther's characteristic appeal to commonsense, urging the prince to
eschew slavish adherence to positive written law, subjecting latter
'to reason, whence it has welled up as from a fountain: let reason
remain master of law.'19 It would thus appear that
Luther can hold that - theoretically - secular government and
Christendom have nothing to do with each other, while averring at
the same time that - practically - they have everything to do with
each other. His view of the ideal relationship of God's two modes
of rule is that while they ought to be distinct from one another,
they are yet inextricably linked: 'neither is sufficient in the
world without the other.'20 But since the two
governments rarely, if ever, complement one another according to
the ideal theological blueprint of the Middle Ages, Luther's view
of the weltlich regiment must lack total consistency.
While both governments were instituted to withstand the power of
the devil, both in fact oscillate between the opposing kingdoms.
The Reformer can accordingly contend both that 'God intends the
secular Regiment to be a model of . . . the kingdom of
heaven'21 and -
changing to eschatological gear - that 'Both kingdoms existed
simultaneously at Rome, Emperor Nero ruling one against Christ and
Christ ruling the other through his Apostles Peter and Paul against
the devil.' 22The inconsistency here lies
not in Luther's mind, but in the changeable countenance of
society.

[6] The writing of On Secular Authority was partly
occasioned by a query raised by the greatest living authority on
jurisprudence in the Empire, Johann Freiherr von Schwarzenberg, who
was troubled by the apparent disharmony of Scripture which could
affirm the coercive power of the sword in the apostolic writings
while at the same time, supremely in the Sermon on the Mount,
seeming to rule out recourse to or participation in its operations.
The solution proffered by mediaeval Catholicism to the dilemma
posed by the incongruity of the moral teachings of Moses and Jesus
or - to adopt the Thomist idiom - between the old law and the new
had been the division of Christians into the secular and religious
estates. Those in the former category, including par excellence the
bearers of the sword, were obliged simply to fulfil e divine
precepts; while those who quitted the world for the cloister were
to attain perfection by freely taking on them the yoke of the
higher morality prescribed in the 'evangelical counsels' of the
Sermon on the Mount. 23By bringing the doctrine of
the priesthood of all believers out of cold storage, Luther was
able to annul the mediaeval division of Christians into secular and
religious. And his understanding of the Sermon on the Mount as not,
as is popularly supposed, restricted to its role as fodder for the
'second use of the law', in which context its impossibly high
standards would provoke smitten consciences to turn from the
hopeless path of justification by works to crave absolution from
the gospel. For the Reformer also acknowledged that the severe
demands issued by Jesus in Mt. 5-7 are commands binding on all
Christians.24
Even so, the application of his exegetical maxim, 'sacra
scriptura sui ipsius interpres',25 made it plain that the
Sermon on the Mount could not possibly mean what the pacifist (or
anarchist?) Anabaptists took it to mean. Luther was accordingly led
to distinguish between the various situations in which the
Christian must necessarily find himself. Always charged coram
Deo with the commandment to love, the Christian is brought
face to face with this immutable imperative in widely differing
circumstances. Should only his own interests be at stake in a given
situation, then the law of love dictates the path of renunciation
of self prescribed in Mt. 5-7 which took Jesus to the Cross. On the
other hand, the Christian may be called to practise love in a
context where not his own but his neighbour's interests are at
stake. In this case the Sermon on the Mount does not apply. Luther
accordingly distinguishes between two persons present within each
believer: the Christian as he exists before God and for himself
(Christperson), and the Christian in society
(Weltperson), clad in a particular office (Amt) -
for example, that of parenthood or governmental authority - which
entails responsibility for others. 26As Weltperson the Christian
can in good conscience both seek redress for his neighbour from the
civil power and, when called to do so, himself exercise that power
for the benefit of others. The exercise of secular authority in
faith can even be considered as a form of worship (Gottis
dienst): 'As a special kind of Gottis dienst the
sword and the authority of government pertain to Christians before
all other folk on earth.27

[7] A difficulty can now be resolved which has led to sharp
debate in post-war Luther scholarship. It has already been
remarked, that On Secular Authority opens with the
Reformer availing himself of a characteristically Augustinian
dualism, resolutely distinguishing the Reich Gottes from
the Reich der Welt and adamant in his insistence that the
order of secular government was instituted for those who belong to
the latter. Onesidedly relying on this item of Luther's teaching,
Johannes Heckel "deemed it impossible for the Christian to be
labelled a 'citizen of two kingdoms' (Burger zweier
Reiche). There are two grounds for supposing that Heckel's
interpretation is unfaithful to the totality of Luther's thought.
First, since the Christian is not entirely free of sin until
perfectly sanctified in heaven, being simul iustus et
peccator, it is not only the unregenerate who needs the
restraints supplied by the 'first use of the law'. Secondly, since
the Christian does not simply lead a life of uncluttered piety
before God but always exists in this world as one shouldering the
responsibilities of an office (Amt) or calling
(Beruf), he is rightfully subject to secular government.
Luther explicitly states as much in a disputation of 1539: 'The
Christian qua Christian moves within the first table of
the law, but he also exists apart from the kingdom of heaven as a
citizen of this world (civis huius mundi). Hence he has a
dual citizenship (utrumque politeuma), being subject to
Christ through faith and to the emperor through his
body.'28

[8] The Reformer was wont to characterise the first of these
dimensions within which the Christian lives as the 'kingdom of
God's right hand' (Reich Gottes zur Rechten) and the
second as the kingdom of God's left hand' (Reich Gottes zur
Linken). Commenting on Ps. 110 in 1518, Luther is moved to
define the 'right hand of God' as the 'kingdom
(künigreich) of Christ, which is a spiritual, hidden
reich.' The counterpart to this kingdom, to wit, the
'visible ,and bodily reich', is aptly termed the 'left
hand of God'. 29A sermon delivered on 15th
December 1532 illuminates Luther's understanding of the 'two
kingdoms', which are here understood as identical with the 'two
governments' and conceived without regard to the antithetical
realms of God and the devil. Thinking of the sphere proper to the
'first use of the law', the Reformer coontends that it 'is indeed
our Lord God's Reich, albeit a temporal law and regiment.
He wills us to respect this Reich with his left, hand, but
the Reich at his right hand is where he rules in
person.'30 This
passage is important on two counts. First, it underscores the fact
that the secular kingdom is not simply identical with the kingdom
of Satan; rather, the 'kingdom of the left hand' was instituted to
restrain evil.' Secondly, as an example of Luther's use of
Reich in the sense of Regiment, it points to the
elasticity of these concepts in his thought. There is no clear-cut
distinction between Reich and Regiment;
regnum and regimen, in his usage.31 The expression 'two
kingdoms' therefore often sounds more dualist than it really is.
Properly understood, it is usually little more than shorthand for
God's two modes of rule.

[9] While mention of the 'two kingdoms' almost invariably
conjures up the figure of Martin Luther, he is demonstrably not the
parent of the concept in either of its two senses. The idea of the
opposing kingdoms of God and the devil was rooted in the Bible and
mediated to medieval Christendom through the theology of S.
Augustine. And the idea of the two correlate powers through which
God governs the Christian world was outlined as early a 494 by Pope
Gelasius I in a letter to Emperor Anastasius I: 'There are, august
emperor, two means by which this world is principally governed,
namely the consecrated authority of the pontiffs and the royal
power.'32 The
ideal relationship between the bearer of the secular sword and the
one whose only legitimate weapon was the sword of the Spirit was
doubtless initially intended to rest on mutual equality and careful
avoidance by each of infringement in the other's proper sphere.
Gelasius' successor Symmachus thought to strike a fitting balance
with his suggestion to the same emperor, 'Defer to God in us and we
shall defer to God in you.33 For the purposes of this
paper it is essential to recollect the runaway inflation of the
papal claims during the millenium which separated Luther from
Gelasius I. Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam, of 1302
represents the pinnacle of this development with its insistence
that the secular sword is rightfully subordinate to the spiritual
sword wielded by the Pope and that it ought to be exercised on
behalf of the Church. Boniface claims for the Pope the right to
judge and, should the need arise, to depose secular rulers, while
averring that the successor of Peter, as the 'homo
spiritualis' of 1 Cor. 2:15, is subject to the superior
jurisdiction ofGod alone.34 Only against the backcloth
of these claims can we comprehend the vehemence of Luther's
reaction to the medieval blurring of the boundary between the
spiritual and secular spheres. Forgetful of the sharp antithesis of
law and gospel, the medieval Church had illicitly compounded the
two to produce a Pelagianising account of the justification of the
sinner. The Reformer likewise found the Christendom of his day
guilty of standing the divinely established order on its head by
permitting the higher clergy to assume political authority and by
encouraging secular rulers to employ coercive means in the
resolution of religious difficulties: 'The Pope and the bishops
should look to their episcopal duty and preach God's Word. This
task they have neglected to become secular princes, ruling through
laws which (pertain only to the body and property. They have finely
turned [God's order] inside out, for while they are supposed to
rule souls inwardly through God's Word, in fact they rule castles,
cities, land and people outwardly, torturing souls with unspeakable
murder. Secular lords are likewise meant to rule land and people
outwardly. Neglectful of this task, . . .they wish to rule souls in
a spiritual capacity.'35 In view of this dual danger
Luther contends that, 'I am constantly obliged to beat, hammer,
drive and knock in the distinction between these two kingdoms, even
though I should write and speak about it so often that it becomes
wearisome. For the accursed devil is unceasingly cooking and
brewing these two kingdoms into one.'36 The second part of On
Secular Authority deals with the question of the proper limits
of spiritual and secular government and with the grave problem of
the extent of the subject's duty to obey commands which go beyond
the competence of their giver. The Reformer was prompted to turn
his mind to these issues by the outbreak of bloody persecution of
'evangelicals' which marked 'the beginning of the
Counter-Reformation. 1st July 1523 saw the Augustinian friars
Henricus Vos and Jan van den Eschen burned at the stake in Brussels
marketplace; and meanwhile, nearer home, Luther's bete
noire Duke George had forbidden the sale of his translation of
the New Testament in ducal Saxony and demanded the surrender of
those copies already distributed. Against this background Luther
enquires 'how long the arm [of secular government] may extend and
how far its hand may reach, lest it should overreach itself by
assaulting God in his reych und regiment.'37 His answer is that 'secular
government has laws which extend no further than the body and
property and what is external onearth.' 38Yet even within the bounds of
the 'kingdom of the left hand no secular ruler is entitled to
unquestioning obedience. Already in the treatise Von den guten
Werken of 1520 Luther teaches that the duty to obey earthly
rulers rests on the supreme authority of the Decalogue, the scope
of whose fourth (fifth) injunction he widens to embrace territorial
and spiritual parenthood as embodied in secular rulers and bearers
of ecclesiastical office. The subject's duty to obey is, however,
qualified by the clausula Petri of Acts 5: 29:.'Should it
transpire, as is in fact often the case, that secular authority and
Obrigkeit, as it is called, should try to persuade a
subject to act contrary to God's commands or to prevent him from
keeping them, then his obedience is at an end and his duty is
abrogated. We must here echo St. Peter's statement to the Jewish
rulers: "We must obey God morethan men."39 Luther immediately gives a
concrete instance of the application of the clausula Petri
with his contention that no upright soldier should render obedience
or otherwise give succour to a prince who 'wishes to go to war in a
manifestly unjust cause.' 40The same counsel is given
three years later in On Secular
Authority41 and then repeated in a
pamphlet on the ethics of war published in 1526. The reason given
in the latter for not performing military service 'when you know
for sure that [your lord] is in the wrong' has an unmistakably
Martinian ring: 'for in this case you can have no good conscience
before God.'42
Nor was this principle forgotten by the aged Reformer who, in a
letter of 7th April 1542, urges the soldier caught up in an unjust
campaign to 'run from the field. . . and save his
soul.'43

[10] While physical coercion must necessarily be employed in the
'kingdom of the left hand', it has no place in the 'kingdom of the
right hand'. Secular government has lawful jurisdiction over body,
'but God neither can nor will let anyone rule over the soul but
himself alone.' 44The meaning of this statement
is not that each soul is capable of immediate and private communion
with God independently of the divinely willed means of grace. For
in keeping with the incarnational tenor of his theology as a whole
Luther consistently taught that inward grace is not bestowed except
through the outward Word and Sacraments.45 Nor would it be far-fetched
to ascribe to the Reformer a mediatorial conception of the
ministerial office: Christ himself preaches and celebrates the
three sacraments of baptism, eucharist and absolution through the
pastor.46 Yet
notwithstanding this high doctrine of the ministry, Luther taught
with equal consistency that the distinction of true from false
doctrine is per se no concern 'of the secular authorities: 'How one
believes or does not believe is a matter for the individual
conscience and hence involves no injury to the secular power. The
latter ought therefore to be content to attend to its own affairs,
permitting men to believe this way or that. . . and persuading no
one by force. For faith is a free work which no one can produce
byviolent means.'47 The cynic may hold that when
Luther remarked in 1521, 'Burning heretics is not tomy
liking,'48 he
was at least partly motivated by concern for self-survival. It is
therefore profitable to recall that when he himself held the upper
hand in the form of the favour of the Saxon princes, the Reformer
remained true to the principle of toleration. In his open letter of
1524 Against the seditious spirit, Luther refrains from
invoking the assistance of the secular arm against the enthusiastic
preaching of Thomas Muntzer. Even "though the latter's teaching
leads souls to destruction, it can only be countered by spiritual
weapons; and the Saxon princes should intervene in Allstedt only in
the event of a breach of the peace: "Simply let them preach with
vigour and confidence. . . against whom they will. For as I have
said, there must needs be sects (cf. I. Cor. II: 19) and the Word
of God must take to the field and engage in battle. . . . If their
spirit is genuine, it will have no fear of us and will endure; and
if ours is genuine, neither will it fear them or anyone. Let the
spirits go at it hammer and tongs. Should some souls be led astray
in the process, so be it, this is the way of war. Some are bound to
fall and suffer injury where battle is waged, but anyone who fights
with integrity will receive a crown. Should they wish to do more
than fight with the Word, however, that is, 'should they wish to
smash and smite with their fists, then Your Graces ought to
intervene.'49
As Heinrich Bornkamm comments, "These words are of epochal
significance in the history of toleration.'50

[11] The post-war period has seen Luther's doctrine of the two
kingdoms become the butt of severe and at times intemperate
criticism. In brief, this facet of his thought has been held
responsible for an alleged surrender of political and social
reality to their own devices by German Protestantism which is
supposed whether directly or indirectly, to have paved the way for
the triumph of the Third Reich. The Reformer is charged with having
planted a virus of unquestioning servility in the bloodstream of
the German people; with having encouraged a fateful quietistic
retreat from everyday life; and with having sundered the bond which
subjects secular life to the restraints of Christian morality.
Granted 'autonomy' by a failure of nerve on the part of its
spiritual mentor, the German nation is thought to have been, blown
through the succeeding centuries bereft of ethical ballast and to
have fallen in the fullness of time like a ripe apple into the
hands of the National Socialists. Perhaps the most famous and
influential expression of this accusation was given by Karl Barth
in 1939 under the guise of a 'letter to France'. Seeking to uncover
the root of the extraordinary political stupidity, confusion and
helplessness of the German people', Barth contended that the latter
'is suffering from the heritage of the greatest Christian German,
to wit, from Martin Luther's error concerning their relationship
between law and gospel and between secular and spiritual order and
power, an error whose effect was not to limit and restrict his
natural paganism (Heidentum), but - on the contrary - to
accord it ideological glorification,' sustenance and
encouragement.51 The ultimate cause of
Barth's distaste for the two kingdoms doctrine would thus appear,
on the basis of his 'letter to France', to have little to do with
the substance of the Reformer's ethics but rather to lie in the
structure of his own theological thought. For as has been noted
above, Luther's view of the operation of secular government within
the 'kingdom of the left hand' presupposes a universal revelation
of divine-cum-natural law in the conscience; in other words, it
breathes the air of natural theology. In the opinion of the present
writer, this is of the most admirable features of Luther's
doctrine, but, in presenting apologetics with a sound
starting-point, the Reformer indicated a 'point of connection'
whose very existence Barth was bound to deny.

[12] There are at least three grounds for dismissing the charge
that, with his two kingdoms doctrine, Luther was in some way
'Hitler's spiritual ancestor'. First, it would seem that the
so-called 'doctrine of the two kingdoms' was not in fact the part
of his social teaching which exercised the greatest influence in
his native land during the four centuries which followed the
Reformer's death. For this role was played by the entirely
un-dualistic conception of the three 'hierarchies' (economic,
political and ecclesiastical) through which God was held to govern
Christendom.52
While this scheme may well have fostered paternalist attitudes, it
is sheer fancifulness to link it with fascism. Second, it is quite
mistaken to suppose that German Protestantism on the eve of the
Third Reich was predominantly Lutheran in any meaningful sense.
Since the House of Hohenzollern adopted the Reformed faith in the
opening years of the seventeenth century, a relentless war of
attrition had been waged against the Lutheran Church by the rulers
of Prussia. Police measures were taken against advocates of
Lutheran Orthodoxy by the Great Elector; the martinet father of
Frederick the Great forcibly suppressed the liturgical expression
of the Lutheran faith in the 1730s; and Frederick William III drove
a coach and horses through the Lutheran Confessions with his
compulsory union of 1817. By the following century German
Lutheranism had become one school of thought among several instead
of a distinctive Church. It is notorious that distinctively and
predominantly Lutheran Scandinavia has had a far happier political
development than was vouchsafed to Germany itself, and a recent
writer on Luther's social ethics has argued that there is a direct
connection between these and the Scandinavian welfare
states.53
Luther: Beveridge's spiritual ancestor! Third, the error of
National Socialism consisted not in unduly separating the two
kingdoms, but in neglecting the limits imposed on the one and the
rightful liberties of the other to fuse the two into a totalitarian
unity which was a parody of both. The accusation that Luther
advocated unbounded obedience to the commands of the secular power
can only rest on ignorance of his repeated stress on the
clausula Petri. And his advice to the soldier to decline
to fight in an unjust war was relevant precisely to the Third
Reich. It may, however, be conceded that there are two ineradicable
stains on the Reformer's reputation in the field of social ethics.
The first stems from his well-publicised advice to the princes to
make short shrift of the rebellious peasants, and the second from
the elder Luther's immoderate outbursts against the Jews. The most
remarkable feature of these two sets of utterances in the present
context is not that they mirror Luther's two kingdoms doctrine, but
that they contravene principles which are central to it. In the
first case, Luther forgets his own counsel that the prince should
eschew severity and punish with leniency; in the second, that faith
is a free work which cannot be produced by violent means. The two
kingdoms doctrine affords the most efficacious remedy for Luther's
own excesses.

[13] While the continued usefulness of the three hierarchies
conception may not be immediately apparent, the doctrine of two
kingdoms remains relevant today. Both spiritual and secular rule
still oscillate between the realms of God and the devil. And at
least two-thirds of the globe exists in the grip of a totalitarian
ideology which is wilfully oblivious of the mystery of
transcendence and of its corollary, namely the limits which are set
to the exercise of secular power, mankind is summoned as never
before to beware of any governmental or social system which
assaults God in his Reich und Regiment. Meanwhile, where
Christendom is still free to discharge an untrammeled prophetic
ministry to the world about, its spokesmen in the several
confessions and denominations often seem wont to absolutise one or
other of those two half-truths which can be succinctly labelled
'verticalism' and 'horizontalism' respectively. Thus while Dr
Edward Norman's mordant analysis of present trends justly merits
respect and, on the whole, assent, it must be asked whether he
could in the end of the day be exculpated of the charge of rending
the two kingdoms asunder by hinting that the Christian faith and
political reality are not even indirectly related. Nor are voices
lacking which suggest that the Church's primary task is to act as
the midwife of political and social change, substituting a
transient secularist creed for the faith once delivered to the
saints. Martin Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms manages to
combine the insight that the Church's prime duty is to publish
abroad the message of both the forgiveness of sins for Jesus' sake
and the future restoration of our vitiated human nature in eternity
with the acknowledgement of the essential God-pleasingness of the
performance of provisional secular tasks in faith. And his
realisation of the preeminence of the heavenly over the earthly
vocation, and of the perils which beset the Christian in both these
spheres, provides a salutary antidote to the idolatry of enthusiasm
which would identify law and gospel, summoning heaven to earth and
producing hell. Avoiding these pitfalls, the Reformer became the
architect of a via media which might be trodden with profit
today.

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